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If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.
We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.
Pablo Neruda
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
Rilke
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love,
for love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith,
but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
T.S.Eliot
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams before the crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing and is nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love…live. Chained by his certitudes, he is a slave; he has forfeited freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.
Unknown
"And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three," it reads in 1 Corinthians, "but the greatest of these
is charity."
"It is easy, terribly easy," George Bernard Shaw wrote, "to shake a man's faith in himself."
And as Alexander Pope wrote:
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."
When William Shakespeare was writing "Measure for Measure," he understood that.
"The miserable," he had Claudio saying,
"have no other medicine but only hope. I have hope to live and am prepared to die."
" 'Tis well averred," Robert Browning wrote, "a scientific faith's absurd."
"Where an equal poise of hope and fear does arbitrate the event," John Milton wrote, "my nature is that I incline to hope rather than fear."
"Hope is a good breakfast," Sir
Francis Bacon wrote, "but it is a bad supper."
"He that lives upon hope," Benjamin Franklin wrote, "will die fasting."
"With malice toward none," Abraham
Lincoln wrote, "with charity for all."
"Be steadfast in your abstention from thoughts of falsehood of fear that things won't work out" Wayne Dyer
"The greater loss is not that your hopes
are too high and you don't reach them, but that they are too low and you do" Michelangelo
"Nothing happens until something moves" Einstein
"You may be done with the past, but the past isn't done
with you" (from the movie "Magnolia")
Morning Poem
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches-
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead-
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging-
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted-
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
Mary Oliver
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